Losing Control

Losing Control
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 10, 2014

I am at war with my machines. This week, I am at choke point with the toaster. It cannot contain the crumbs from even a single slice of bread. Its crumb tray is like men’s nipples, a useless feature that should have been engineered out of the final design.

I’ve taken to upending my toaster over the sink and shaking it violently until I hear its innards rattle. When it cannot cough up another single speck of bread dust, I give it one last slap to remind it who’s boss and plonk it back into its corner of the kitchen bench.

Next morning, as I pull my machine out to toast my slice of kibble rye, I see it has dumped yet another load of sooty crumbs and flame-grilled raisins from some dark orifice.

I’m already cheesed off with the dishwasher  – a computerised princess who recently gagged on a pea. Or so the repair-man told me when he asked me for $180 to remove it. For three days, a fetid pool of bilge water had refused to drain from the bowels of the machine. To stem the smelly tide, I transferred cupfuls of grey swamp-water to the sink, then got down on my hands and knees and groped around in her murky fundament, hoping to release the blockage. The repair-man thanked me for doing the dirty work and sieved out a lone pea, swollen and grey, but capable of gumming up a sophisticated machine several hundred times its size. 

I’m afraid the house is ganging up on me. The doorbell has begun checking if we’re home by ringing itself at two in the morning. The first time it happened, I was startled awake by the loud peals echoing down the hallway. Suspecting a brazen burglar, my bloke leapt out of bed and began fumbling about in the dark for a weapon. He stumbled over teenage son’s tennis bag dumped by the front door. Fuelled by adrenalin and primed to inflict some racquet abuse, my bloke wrenched open the door brandishing a Junior Prince Warrior, rrp $59.  A cool breeze invited itself in and gusted down the passageway, slamming the hallway door and waking all three children.

Two nights later, our midnight caller struck again. There were phantom chimes during the day as well until my husband ripped the doorbell from its casing. (Visitors now spook us by magically appearing on the back veranda when their volleys of doorknocking go unheard.)

I keep reading scary stories about how our machines will soon do our thinking for us. Human evolution will stall as our gadgetry becomes superior. Bollocks! All my appliances are still hopelessly dependent. Their shortcomings might push my buttons but they won’t do a thing if I don’t push theirs.

We’re yet to get a robotic vacuum cleaner though friends say they’re marvellous. I’m all for handing over my gritty floors to a robo-maid who works tirelessly through the night. My husband says they’re a stupid gimmick and a Hoover needs a human to do a decent job. (This from a man who has never used one.)

I can remember when chess champion Gary Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue in that pivotal victory of machine over man. But that was twenty years ago and I’m not yet being chauffeured by a driverless car. My self-cleaning oven still won’t clean itself.

Boffins predict by 2030, computers will have all but disappeared from sight. They’ll be everywhere yet nowhere, ubiquitous yet hidden, just like electricity and running water, and my children at bedtime. Apple’s iCloud will follow us silently and seamlessly, absorbing our thoughts as we think them. (My dirty ones will stream live to iPorn).

Right now, my computer is attached to an overcrowded power board via a spaghetti junction of cables. The wi-fi regularly goes awol. It’s hopeless upstairs. Last week, I discovered my 13-year-old squeezed into the corner between his bedroom door and his wardrobe, crouched over his laptop. “I’m doing my maths homework. Really Mum! This is the only spot where the wi-fi works.” For once, I believed him.

The next morning at 6am, still half asleep, I nearly garrotted myself on the ethernet cable which teenage son had strung overnight across the stairwell. “What the heck?” I demanded, pointing to the blue cable looped to the walls with globs of Blu-Tack. “Oh, that!” he said. “I ran the internet cable upstairs to get Google.” (All the technology in the world means nothing if you have a teenage boy at the controls.)

For now, I’d like to think I’m still the boss of my machines. At least until my smartphone outsmarts me and incites a mutiny amongst my appliances. That’s when the phantom doorbell will give the signal, the freezer will have a meltdown and my coffee machine will serve nothing but decaf.  

The Next Best Thing

The Next Best Thing
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 1, 2013

Here’s my conspiracy theory: today’s gadgets are made to fail. And here’s my evidence: both the vacuum cleaner and my mobile phone have carked it just weeks out of warranty.

Last Sunday, the vacuum cleaner, my trusty servant, stopped dead. The two of us were having a lovely time sucking up all the bits of Lego left lying on the loungeroom floor. (We often play games, the vacuum cleaner and I, ferreting about under the sofa with the suction at warp speed. We try to guess from the rattle – rattle – clunk! what mystery object has shot up the hose.)

Always noisy and frolicsome, my appliance was suddenly still. All I could hear was a faint ticking. I rolled its body into the recovery position, ripped open the lid and shook the bag resting limply inside. I smacked the machine shut hoping to restore its noisy breath. Nothing. I squinted up the hose to see if its airway was blocked but I had an interrupted view of the front door. I emptied the dust filter and pumped the on/off switch with a firm but steady rhythm but by now its body was cold.

I had just enough time to race to the electrical shop before it closed. I burst through the door, my expensive Italian clutched in my arms, dribbling fine grey dust from its back end. The bloke behind the counter took one look and said: “We’ll have a crack, luv, but now that it’s out of warranty, the drop-off fee is $85 and we charge $65 an hour labour which doesn’t cover parts so it might be cheaper to buy a new one.”

I got the feeling he knew something I didn’t: my two-year-old vacuum cleaner was built notto last. It had what Choice Magazine calls “planned obsolescence.” I felt like a chump. Here I was thinking my vacuum and I had a future together, and it was secretly planning career suicide. I forgave the betrayal and begged the electrician: “I need to know what went wrong, if you can’t fix it, I want an autopsy.”

The very next day, my mobile phone crashed in sympathy. An inky blank screen stared back at me. Somewhere inside it were the phone numbers of everyone I know. I went to the Apple store, a place so technologically advanced the geeky staff look uber-cool in their coke-bottle glasses and identical blue polo shirts. Customers, depending on their age, look either confused or euphoric at the smorgasbord of technology laid out before them. At the door, the maitre d’Apple fiddled around with my phone for a minute then suggested: “Time for an upgrade?” I tried to look euphoric but he sensed my confusion.

“Did you back it up ma’am?” He already knew the answer so I replied guiltily: “Please tell me you can restore it? My social life lives inside that  phone.”

 “Well, if it can be fixed, it’ll take a couple of weeks. But your screen is cracked  and iPhone 4s are pretty outdated now….”

“Okay, okay” I interrupt, “I get your drift.”

Mobile phones aren’t meant to be repaired, they’re meant to be upgraded. Superseded by something a little thinner or a little longer so that the charger and the three covers you have at home no longer fit.

I can’t get used to the idea that TVs and computers and cameras that are working just fine should be replaced simply because a newer version comes along. It makes me feel gluttonous.

My mother had her Hecla toaster for nearly 30 years. It had doors that flipped down and it never complained no matter how thick the toast we stuffed in it. In Mum’s day, broken things were fixed by a generation of menders and make-doers with tweezers and soldering irons. My eldest, 12, is a whizz at building contraptions, but already, he loves to trade up his gear. How many pairs of headphones are enough? Will Playstation 3 be embarrassing once Playstation 4 arrives?  

There was nothing terribly wrong with my vacuum cleaner, as it happens, it just had a worn belt. The repair cost me $160 but we are reunited. Now  I know my two-year-old Italian is past its prime. 

My new phone, however, has been greeted with much excitement by the small members of the house. It’d be even more exciting if I knew the phone number of someone to call, but for now, the phone and I are just a lonely little twosome with lots of fancy icons. My iPhone 5 is so advanced it has a genie inside it called “Siri” who listens, comments and does whatever I say. “Call Chelsea Pizza” I demand, and she finds the number and dials it. “Siri, are you my friend”, I ask her, as the kids guffaw.

“I am not just your friend” she replies in her husky robotic voice, “I am your new “B-F-F.” The kids are now hysterical. I quietly explain to Siri that the vacuum cleaner and I were once “Best Friends Forever”, but we fell out over some Lego.